 Yeah, it's more than just the Constitution. This is American Issues Take Two with Tim Apichella, co-host, and Stephanie Stowdahl, a regular contributor. Welcome to the show, you guys. Morning. Let me frame it like this. Kay, we talked yesterday on Take One about Trump's remarks about the Constitution that he wanted to terminate the Constitution. No confusion what he said. And he tried to walk that back, but it doesn't work because he said it. So the question is, where does that fit in the continuum of Trump's behavior, the behavior of the GOP, the Trump GOP, and the other GOP? And where does it go from here? I hate to call for speculation, but that's exactly what I'm calling for. So if you watch the Gantt chart that Ari Melber, the Gantt chart that Ari Melber presented on MSNBC, you know that Trump began with less illegal, less seditious initiatives. And each time he was rebuffed, he went to more seditious initiatives, more desperate initiatives. And now, by his comments around the Constitution and taking that on the heels of January 6th, we have a more desperate situation. And to add fuel to the fire doesn't look so good for him in Mar-a-Lago or for that matter on the January 6th investigation. So you could assume on the Ari Melber Gantt chart that it will be more desperate for him, more desperate times. And the question is, you know, how desperate will they get those times? And what will he say to his base, his old base, or his new, more extreme base? How will the GOP react to that going forward? And the bottom line question is, what will Trump do? And will it be successful? How damaging it will be for the country? Let's start with you, Tim. Can you wrap around the question of, how much support Trump is losing right now so as to make him more desperate? I think quiet support is peeling off. They're not still yet willing to come out in front of a CNN or MSNBC or Fox TV news cameras and say that they're done with them. They're still concerned about Trump's 33% base, the MAGA GOP, which still seems to be red hot and still quite powerful and to these politicians quite intimidating. So, but I think deep down inside, they know he's done. They know that after the midterm elections and certainly after the Georgia election, Trump influence as a kingmaker is over. And that most GOP, I think, most, maybe 66%, they have severe Trump fatigue. And they're looking for the new candidate to come out into the marketplace and take the GOP party into a new direction. And of course, that candidate's not out there yet. Everyone wishes and hopes that DeSantis is the one. They think that he will, my polls, he's already way ahead of Donald Trump, but it's premature for DeSantis to come out into the scene. So, we're stuck with Trump. They're stuck with Trump. And I think they want to move away as quickly as possible, but they just don't have anyone yet to rally around. You know, the Georgia runoff is kind of iconic in the sense that Herschel Walker was his candidate. He put him up there and supported him at least at first. And I guess then as a strategical matter, he backed away because he thought he was more of a negative factor than a positive one. But the Herschel Walker's loss to me is more than just Trump can't find a good candidate. I'll tell you what I think, and I like your opinion about it. It's that he used these primaries, these elections as a way to demonstrate his power and the threat that he could make against the sitting member of Congress was to say, I'm going to primary you. I'm going to bring in a Trump candidate and then I'm going to support that candidate and that candidate will bash you when you're out of a job. But after Georgia seems to me that the calculus for somebody who might be affected by this or that threat before may not be so affected now. What do you think? I can agree with you more. Just real quick, remember the old attorney's refrain is never asked the question, you don't have the answer to. Well, that applies in politics as well. And that is never pull off a political stunt. You don't think it's going to go in your direction. And certainly backing all these candidates was that political stunt? It was a barometer for Donald Trump to say, I still am the kingmaker and I'm still the head cheese here in this party. But it didn't work for him. It didn't go in his direction. So like the attorney that asked the question and got the wrong answer in the witness box. So Stephanie, according to the R.E. Melbur dance chart, at first the things that Trump was doing say before the 2020 election, were not necessarily provably illegal and they were not criminal necessarily. I mean, it was arguable. But then when he began to get desperate, and a good example would be January 6th, he went to more desperate measures, more criminal measures. And R.E. Melbur's analysis is that if you watch the dance chart, you will see that as he gets more desperate, the measures get more desperate and more illegal, more seditious. Okay, so somehow, you may or may not agree, but somehow his claim that the constitution should be terminated seems at least as desperate as anything he's done. Because it not only suggests that he doesn't believe in the constitution and the government, that he believes in himself, Uber Alice, and that he is organizing on that basis another attempted coup. So how serious is it in the continuum that he is now shoved off from the United States Constitution? And what is it portent? Well, I see what I consider, in contrast to all that's gone on at Doodle now, a virtual route of him. The only person that's standing up for him is Kilian Conway. And her big question about the loss is that, well, why weren't all the other 49 senators are out there, Republican senators helping him out? There wasn't enough help for him. But he's being completely eviscerated by Hannity and other Republicans for his requirements for Republicans to stop early voting and not use meal-in ballots. And all that he told everybody to do and that they did has an impact on their failure rate. So he's being taken on for that all around. So we're not, he's surely getting ready to come back something on that. But those are the major Fox people and commentators in on the smart news and like that is that he is seen now as a reprobate and one who got in the way of the Republicans winning all these elections and that if they hadn't listened to any of that, that it is counterintuitive and that the kinds of advice that he put out was illogical. They're saying the same things that were brought up during the time that he was recommending and demanding that his followers act in that way. So I see him as being moved into the corner, but that in no way belies your theory here that he's gonna come out fighting with something and we'll see what it is and it will probably be ferocious as it usually is as a first response to a very, very general route of him. So we're gonna have some interesting time and it looks like Romney's out there saying things. So slowly, slowly, slowly they're stepping up and I do believe I'm feeling that things are moving against him and he's gonna have to face up to some serious consequences here. Well, your reference to the remarks of Kellyanne Conway, I find very interesting. I remember she was some official, maybe a campaign spokesman person in 2016 and she's the one who talked about alternative truth and I remember my initial reaction as to holy moly, how can a presidential candidate lie and we found through Kellyanne Conway that that was a cornerstone of his campaign lying and then justifying it as alternatives. It was mad, it was insane and she was the spokesman for it. So fast forward six years, seven years, whatever it is. Now Kellyanne Conway who has been out of the administration and her husband George doesn't agree with her about anything, he appears to oppose Trump every time he gets a chance. God, I wonder how their marriage is doing. So now Kellyanne Conway comes back. She's been off the platform for a while, he comes back and she makes it and what floods my brain is that Trump could see all these people you mentioned backing away from. He's trying to find somebody who will come under the spotlight and support him. Okay, and- When Fox says too, that's why she's on the panel now. He tells a bunch of people, he calls all his old friends and he says, would you like to talk for me? I need a statement from you. And they say, you know, I'd really rather stay out of the limelight on this funnel. You know, I won't come out against you but then I won't come out for you either. I'm just gonna stay on the sideline and he looks and he talks and he calls and finally he finds Kellyanne Conway. This is Kellyanne, I need you to make one of those alternative truth statements for me now. He needs you back, Kellyanne. And she says, okay. And that's why we have Kellyanne, what do you think? Well, Jay, remember, you know, the love of money. I'm sorry, who are you talking to, Jay? Well, I was just gonna say, but yes. Okay, all right, I was gonna say, Jay is right on such an important point and a real signal of what's going on and that he may have had to do with that. But I see that Fox is sputtering too. I mean, for days and hours, you know, I'll check in on them and their coverage is like off the wall, Tanzania, you know, people's individual stories. Meanwhile, all this stuff is breaking on the other channels and Fox is kind of like, even on the five and all of these different programs, they're just ignoring so much of it. And I think that it's Fox too, that's helping Trump to bring people like Kellyanne back to your point, Jay, because they need somebody to speak for him. You know, Tim, you were talking about money and we know that whatever you wanna say, Trump has money right now. Well, yeah, I mean, what's the correlation between Kellyanne and Conway back on the airwaves supporting Donald Trump? She's getting a paycheck again from him. I mean, love of money is the root of all evil and people will sell their souls and that's what she's doing yet again. Oh my God, it's not a mystery, she's getting paid. So yeah, anyone who's getting paid, you'll see him in front of Fox cameras and defending the great Donald. But you know, that's great until Donald starts bouncing his checks, which he loves to do. Which hopefully he might have happened to him, Jay, because we've got that conviction. I mean, it is a civil case, but he's gonna owe millions of dollars on that because of the verdict on his company. That he's in deep doo-doo on that. But and that AG is not finished yet. This is just chapter one. So yes, that, but to your point, Jay, I still think that with the program, focusing the show, focusing on what is he gonna do because he's under duress now, more ever than he's been, really under duress. So you guys are talking about what is the potential here for his next round? I'm glad he doesn't have the nuclear codes under his control, I'm glad of that. Because I think he's gonna spin off into some real craziness. But here, so we have people pulling away from him and we have this obviously desperate move of Kellyanne Conway and for that matter, the constitutional argument that he makes, that seems to be desperate too. But Tim, let me go to you on this one. You know, yesterday on take one, we talked about how this constitutional initiative of his is a suggestion that the constitution should be quote, terminated, is a way to activate a new group of people for his base, people who were more extreme, more violent, more out of their squash. And I continue to feel that that was at least part of it. But the other part, let me ask you about the other part. He's testing the water, isn't he? He's testing the water to see how much pushback he's gonna get on that and whether, you know, sure, you know, he knows that the Democrats will push back. He knows that some members of Congress will push back. But the question is, is he getting pushback from people who are in his base or could be in his base, people who are way over to the right extremists? Because if he doesn't get pushback from them, it means, yes, Donald can try another insurrection or something along those lines to actually break the government. So it's more than just, you know, he's going over the side, which I don't think you could make that because he's too clever to go over the side. There's always a reason for it in his perverted way of looking at things. And by the way, what do you think might be the secondary purpose of that, of that? Well, I really agree with you that he likes to test the waters, say outrageous things to see what kind of reaction he gets. Because in Donald Trump's own little mind, he thinks that people forget. No one has forgotten, remember yesterday's show, in the introduction, I started bringing out his classic hit parades of famous things, he said, and people will find deplorable. And one of them was good people on both sides, veterans or suckers and losers. I mean, so there, although of the thousands of things he said that were just deplorable, there are those salient points that people do remember. But in Donald Trump's mind, they don't remember. So when he said that, you know, basically we can terminate the constitution, it's just one more thing that he thinks the American public won't retain and won't remember. But I also think in Donald Trump's world, if I say it enough times, I'll desensitize my listening audience and they'll be get used to it. And then when I do it, they won't have a reaction to it. And this is the good old fashioned, the march and the, you know, the march to fascism is to make outrageous statements, do outrageous things until my audience becomes desensitized and just goes along with it. So we may hear more from Donald Trump as pertains to undermine the rule of law and the constitution, because now he's got it out once and what's to prevent him from doing it again? So I think it was within the last couple of days the Supreme Court had argument on the Hopper case. The one that would change again for the worst federalism in this country as originally expressed by the founders. What implications does the decision of Supreme Court have on that? I mean, if they rule, for example, in favor of this kind of states' rights, you know, that make it harder to preserve rights to vote, right, right, right to vote. How does that affect Trump's initiative to undo the country and the constitution? Yeah. Oh, great things because he could call, get on the phone as he does with many state legislators that are of the MAGA GOP, of the loyal following and influence them directly, where you may not be able to get away with that so easily with, you know, through the federal process. You can't just get on the phone with the Supreme Court justice. So yeah. Oh no, oh no. Well, he can when he interviews them for the job and he did. Just call their wives. Yeah. Well, good point. Through cocktail parties in Washington, D.C. Good point. But yeah, I mean, that would go greatly for Donald Trump. But let's remember what Neil Cotier did. He used Justice Thomas' own court case against Justice Thomas. And what a great thing that was to basically say to Clarence Thomas, hey, you can't really support this because your previous ruling in another case was just the opposite. K-PASA. That's a good point. And so Stephanie, you're talking about really important things here when you're talking about, you know, the various possibilities for indictment against him. We've heard recently that there were yet other documents that he had, has. And we've heard that the declaration by counsel back in early 2022, that there were no more documents. They didn't have any other than they made some sort of diligent search so no more documents was untrue. Of course, the benefit of that is that those, that lawyer is in trouble now. That lawyer, you know, could be indicted herself for that false statement. I don't think they have a lot of trouble getting an indictment against her for the false statement. They can trade that off. They can trade that off for, you know, prosecutorial purposes to get information about him and to further implicate him. And then at the same time, you know, we have the committee report coming out in a few days and they indicate that, A, there's more in there than we know, maybe nothing profound, but maybe they connect the dots better. And they always have Ari Melbers, I can't start to help them, you know. And, you know, it may be when they announce which is going to be the 21st of December, that it's worse. So he's got all kinds of reverses going on lately. But the question I put to you is, you know, he's tough on that. He almost enjoys it. He's Bonnie and Clyde, American folk hero for a lot of people. He wants to be on the headlines and he gets on the headlines, you know, and at least half the country is devoted to following him and enjoying his machination. Bonnie and Clyde. So query, is any of that going to make a difference? Well, Jay, that's exactly what I'm delighted to have. You asked me because what has not been covered and had me in a tizzy yesterday morning when I woke up because I was worried about it of the night before, which is, this was a close election. I mean, barely a percentage point between Wenarki and Walker. What, that was hugely close. I mean, that could, that seems that it would be eligible for a recount. But I'm just saying, so what does that mean? Nobody's talking about all the base came out. I mean, as many Republicans as probably are in Georgia must have voted for him. The count was so high. There must, if there were 1.45 total, there must have been, you know, half of that or a little bit less than half were all the Republicans. So where are we going on that? Nobody's talking about what that means. I mean, they are slicing and dicing it in interesting ways and you are seeing some patterns and trends and everything. But nevertheless, that was way too close or comfort. And so when they called that, even with 99% of the vote in, I thought, wait a minute, this thing could turn like the worm. So I think he could pick up on a lot of this and do a Cary Lake thing and his own thing all over again because something is not being really examined here like it needs to be. So what do you, I'm interested to hear as a little talk about what that means to you all. I'm terribly afraid of it. And I think he'll use that. Maybe that's gonna be a grip for him, Jay, you know, for him to grab onto and come back with some kind of huge bunch. Has it happened yet? I haven't seen that in a press. Let me just jump on that statement, Stephanie. Stephanie, you're right. It was too thin and I found the Democrats celebrating way too much. Because you looked at a quality candidate like Warnock to a horribly flawed candidate. And to your point, it was unbelievably close. It should not have been that close. It was 100,000 votes. No way should have been that close for a candidate of such horrible composition. And a candidate was a total insult to the black African-American community and 100,000 votes, really? And the Democrats are celebrating excessively? Come on. Really good points, Tim. Really, yes, go on. Because that is just a fluke election. You can't say, they can't take credit for any big advance in their work in his campaign. It's a fluke. It was even less than 100,000. Anyway, I'll be interested to see more discussion. The fact that there's been no talk about challenging it just yet. Has it been, I haven't heard anything about a challenge to that election? I think you have to be a lot closer in the votes. 100,000. And I think it is 100,000, Stephanie. I think I've read that somewhere. It's a percentage point, and that probably gets him over. That does it. I don't want to agree. I'd like to go to one other thing. It's my Charles Dickens question. You might have heard this question before. What is the ghost of Christmas future here? And let's assume, okay, that he's not kidding when he takes off after the Constitution. Let's assume that he's satisfied with the level of feedback and he starts conspiring with his old friends who are still all around him, mind you. The same people, same organizations, same level of dedication or more, now more sophisticated than they were in January 6th. And so he wants to start another January 6th. And we've already agreed it's not gonna look exactly the same, it'll be different. And likelihood is it'll be violent. And it'll be in wider around the country, not just at the Capitol. So let's assume he does that. Let's assume he grabs the headlines, grabs these extremists into his new base. And nobody stands against him. And he makes some traction. Let's assume that he is able to somehow get in power again, whether it be in the 2024 election or before. I know this is something that's hard to imagine right now and we don't wanna imagine it, but let's imagine it for this discussion. He gets back into power, okay? And he's gonna try to stay in power as long as possible. Sort of like Xi Jinping or Putin. And he's going to cut down on all kinds of civil rights right away. He's gonna play to his base. He's got a transactional thing with them where he's supposed to do certain stuff. And it's all bad, okay? So what is it gonna be like? In the New York times, there was a video article about a priest in a nowhere town in rural Russia who spoke to a community of a congregation or something like 10 people in this nowhere town and said he opposed the war, okay? And they came for him because he said that. And he wound up getting interrogated for hours and hours and hours. They wrote him up, they charged him, they organized a show trial for him. They defrocked him and now he's an unemployed priest. And this story is so compelling, it got into the press all over the world. So instead of 10 people, we got 100 million people around the world who heard about this priest. His name is Burdan, B-U-R-D-I-N. So what I'm saying is we have freedom of the press seems to be a low-hanging fruit target in this, you know, Charles Dickens scenario. But can you imagine what that scenario would be like to him if Donald Teflon Don gets back in there? Well, we've talked about it for six years, you know? Him in power, then out of power, back in power. And, you know, you framed this question by the Christmas of Christmas future, which I asked where I respond every time, in the same words of Ebenezer Scrooge, is this the future that may be or will be? And what may be is the scenario which you've just painted. He won't waste time filling the agencies of law enforcement, the DOJ, with lackeys, loyal lackeys that are more forthright in their loyalty to Donald Trump, certainly more than Bill Barr was. He won't waste time of trying to hamstring the media. He won't waste time trying to install, you know, thugs, his chosen thugs in the immigration and Homeland Security Department. These are very bleak things. That's why the DOJ, I hate to say it, and not to act in a political way, but to act within the guidelines of the rule of law needs to keep Donald Trump off balance. And certainly off balance enough that his chances of reelection are zero to nil. And that's gonna be only through, you know, earnest prosecution, and which always starts with an indictment, which I expect to happen in two weeks or less. Okay, but would an indictment stop him? It's the first footstep to prosecution. It will rattle his cage. It's never been done before. Yeah, well, we have Congress's report. We have the possibility of the indictment, say, within two weeks. It's gonna be Christmas cheer all around if all those things happen. On the other hand- December 24th would be great for me to see it. Yeah, yeah, I think that'd be good. It was. You know, it's an important holiday. Holiday of joy sort of thing. But Stephanie, you know, you were talking earlier about, you know, what he could do and how quickly he could set up some kind of distraction to distract us from the distraction that distracted us from the distraction before. Something that would change, you know, change the whole picture and change what people are thinking and saying and what the media is writing. And you said, you were talking about how long it would take him to do that. Well, let me ask you this, you know, if he knows or if he watches stink tech and he knows that something is gonna happen by Christmas, then he can do that by Christmas too. What are the chances that he will come up with some enormous play-grantee distraction before Christmas? Well, Jay, you're suggesting and insinuating that this man's following is serious. It's validated even in the last Georgia election. They're all there still for him. So I don't know what it is we're thinking is gonna happen, but that hasn't changed. And did he inspire the Germans? Is this an inspiration by Donald Trump? So can he plug in, as you say, or tends it internationally even, get the broader audience, the point you're making, he's got lots of pieces to plug into that. And my God, he can get the Irish all screwed up again too. Could he? I mean, it is just amazing. So if that's the kind of big, I mean, you're making a suggestion here about there's a lot of big more stuff he could do it and it could go international. And that is just horrifying. Your reference is the group in Germany that was arrested. On a January 6th, and look what they did. They went right out and got them. No, no, no, within the last couple of days. Yes. And we got all those French. Yeah, yeah. And then there's the whole French group that came that was standing around waiting for their election. So if you stop and think about this, it's another threat, it's another jeopardy that we could be in. And is Elon Musk gonna encourage that? I mean, if Elon Musk is gonna put him back on Twitter that's worldwide. I mean, so this is very frightening to stop and think about the Gantt chart going forward what could happen, Jack. What you're, you know, instilling. If he pulls off stunts like that that are even more threatening, even more illegal. This is an interesting question. Let's assume he does. Let's assume he pulls off another January 6th, okay? Judging from what we have learned from the way DOJ and Joe Biden work, what will be the government's response and how soon will the government be able to organize that response? Now granted, you know, he doesn't have any control over the police or the military or anything the way he did in January 6th. But I would be concerned that DOJ wouldn't move fast enough on it. And it would take the headlines without a count availing response from the administration. I'd be concerned about that. But you know, Jay, actually, don't we have more tools for international issues of terrorism? Maybe we have more tools there to actually bring to bear on it, which they say we have no tools domestically and how are we gonna get those inserted to handle domestic terrorism? I hope there's somebody out there thinking about these things, Stephanie, really. This is huge, yes. I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, it's really very frightening because there aren't groups, the groups are everywhere that would be responsive and may are influenced maybe by him. So, Tim, I would never disagree with Stephanie. Well, almost never. It's part advice. But you know, she mentioned that she, you know, she thought that Ron DeSantis would be, you know, a good, you know, a better Republican candidate right now. What about, you know, you always talk about this, an organized, strategic, you know, effort by the Democrats. What about some Democratic candidates? None of them rises to the level of DeSantis, simply in, you know, name recognition. But what about the Democrats? Where are they? What happened to them? Why can't they come on the stage also and feel the candidate who would be a credible, likely candidate in 2024? Why can't they do that? And for the lack of that, you know, what is the effect on this interim period? Well, gee, Jay, we need another show for me to criticize the Democrats. Let me just start with Meek, Timid. They can't stand on their hind legs. Let me just, you know, many adjectives I can go down the list with. They just don't know how to sing off the same song page and walk in unison like the Republicans do. And they just don't know how to do it. You got the Progressive Party that's always out there on a tree limb. You have the Bernie Sanders out there on a tree limb. They're not in lockstep. That's one reason. Two, it's just premature. We're only had two more years to go. So you've got at least another six to eight months before you start getting into those conversations. And we'll see if Iowa is the first primary over it's North Carolina. You know, South Carolina, excuse me. All right, we're running out of time. Let me go to you for final comments, Stephanie. And, you know, see what you think about the future. Let me frame it by saying, you know, Trump may be down and he has lost a certain amount of support. That's in the paper every day, but he is Teflon and he has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. And so he may be back. And I guess the question I would put to you was, you know, what was your frame of mind at this point? Are we at another damn inflection point? And where's the inflection going? Exactly, I'm scared myself to death on the international bigger picture scene where what Elon Musk opening up those resources to him and encouraging him and backing him. So, you know, I think all the points are well taken. He's got another, he's not going anywhere at this point. He's getting, as I said earlier, he's getting trust up on this loss in Georgia, but it's not so big a loss. And I think he's gonna rectify that view of people in the country to remind everybody how close it was. And then he's bringing out his minions, Kellyanne and there are many others. And maybe Fox is gonna get yanked back because Hannity was pretty going off the script there yesterday about changing the Republican stance on voting and mail-in voting and absentee ballots. And what did they also call this other thing, harvesting voting? He wants all of the Republicans to get on board with all of that. So we'll see if Fox is gonna go forward with that. But yeah, probably they're waiting to hear from him too because there's been a bit of a lull here. So, you know, he's got his thinking cap on. Yeah, you know, and one thing we've talked about, always talked about with the factor into any look into Charles Ticken's future is it's very hard to predict with all of these variables, all these people, all these strange things happening on the horizon. It's very hard to get a handle. Very hard to look retrospectively from the future. And so, you know, whatever we say, it really depends on the right people waking up alive tomorrow morning and excluding any remarkable, you know, events that we simply, simply could never, well, not likely predict. So Tim, your final comments on all that? My final comments kind of goes back to the previous question about the Democrats. And I guess what's on my mind is for any Democrat leader that says, we like to see Donald Trump as the GOP nominee, that needs to stop because Donald Trump is wily. He's unpredictable. He could pull a rabbit out of the hat and he could be the next president again. So I'd like to hear any and all Democrats stop that kind of talk, saying that we'd like to see Trump as the nominee because we think we can beat him. I'd say you take this, the president, the former president needs to be taken off the stage and let him implode or let the DOJ do it from enforcing the rule of law. But let's not take the man for granted. Okay, you know, seems to me that there's going to be plenty of content for us to examine. Plenty of events, plenty of knock your socks off kinds of things happening in the year 2023, which is coming soon. We can predict some of it, we can connect the dots as it happens, but very hard to get a handle on it. Which means Tim and Stephanie, we have our work cut out for us. They're counting on us out there to continue to connect the dots and make sense of all this. And I think we're going to have more work doing that next year. So stay happy, stay healthy, stay on Think Tech and we'll see you next week. Tim Apachele, Stephanie Stoltzahl, thank you very much. Aloha.